by Frank Norris
But on the other hand — listen:
“The days were accomplished that she should be delivered, and she brought forth her first born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”
Simplicity could go no further. Absolutely not one word unessential, not a single adjective that is not merely descriptive. The whole matter stated with the terseness of a military report, and yet — there is the epic, the world epic, beautiful, majestic, incomparably dignified, and no ready writer, no Milton nor Shakspere, with all the wealth of their vocabularies, with all the resources of their genius, with all their power of simile or metaphpr, their pomp of eloquence or their royal pageantry of hexameters, could produce the effect contained in these two simple declarative sentences.
The mistake that we little people are so prone to make is this: that the more intense the emotional quality of the scene described, the more “vivid,” the more exalted, the more richly coloured we suppose should be the language.
When the crisis of the tale is reached there is where we like the author to spread himself, to show the effectiveness of his treatment. But if we would only pause to take a moment’s thought we must surely see that the simplest, even the barest statement of fact is only not all-sufficient but all-appropriate.
Elaborate phrase, rhetoric, me intimacy of metaphor and allegory and simile is forgivable for the unimportant episodes where the interest of the narrative is languid; where we are willing to watch the author’s ingenuity in the matter of scrolls and fretwork and mosaics-rococo work. But when the catastrophe comes, when the narrative swings clear upon its pivot and we are lifted with it from out the world of our surroundings, we want to forget the author. We want no adjectives to blur our substantives. The substantives may now speak for themselves. We want no metaphor, no simile to make clear the matter. If at this moment of drama and intensity the matter is not of itself preëminently clear no verbiage, however ingenious, will clarify it. Heighten the effect. Does exclamation and heroics on the part of the bystanders ever make the curbstone drama more poignant? Who would care to see Niagara through coloured fire and calcium lights.
The simple treatment, whether of a piece of silversmith work or of a momentous religious epic, is always the most difficult of all. It demands more of the artist. The unskilful story-teller as often as not tells the story to himself as well as to his hearers as he goes along. Not sure of exactly how he is to reach the end, not sure even of the end itself, he must feel his way from incident to incident, from page to page, fumbling, using many words, repeating himself. To hide the confusion there is one resource — elaboration, exaggerated outline, violent colour, till at last the unstable outline disappears under the accumulation, and the reader is to be so dazzled with the wit of the dialogue, the smartness of the repartee, the felicity of the diction, that he will not see the gaps and lapses in the structure itself — just as the “nobby” drummer wears a wide and showy scarf to conceal a soiled shirt-bosom.
But in the master-works of narrative there is none of this shamming, no shoddyism, no humbug. There is little more than bare outline, but in the care with which it is drawn, how much thought, what infinite pains go to the making of each stroke, so that when it is made it falls just at the right place and exactly in its right sequence. This attained, what need is there for more? Comment is superfluous. If the author make the scene appear terrible to the reader he need not say in himself or in the mouth of some protagonist, “It is terrible!” If the picture is pathetic so that he who reads must weep, how superfluous, how intrusive should the author exclaim, “It was pitiful to the point of tears.” If beautiful, we do not want him to tell us so. We want him to make it beautiful and our own appreciation will supply the adjectives.
Beauty, the ultimate philosophical beauty, is not a thing of elaboration, but on the contrary of an almost barren nudity: a jewel may be an exquisite gem, a woman may have a beautiful arm, but the bracelet does not make the arm more beautiful, nor the arm the bracelet. One must admire them separately, and the moment that the jewel ceases to have a value or a reason upon the arm it is better in the case, where it may enjoy an undivided attention.
But after so many hundreds of years of art and artists, of civilization and progress, we have got so far away from the sane old homely uncomplex way of looking out at the world that the simple things no longer charm, and the simple declarative sentence, straightforward, plain, seems flat to our intellectual palate — flat and tasteless and crude.
What we would now call simple our forbears would look upon as a farrago of gimcrackery, and all our art — the art of the better-minded of us — is only a striving to get back to the unblurred, direct simplicity of those writers who could see that the Wonderful, the Counselor, the mighty God, the Prince of Peace, could be laid in a manger and yet be the Saviour of the world.
It is this same spirit, this disdaining of simplicity that has so warped and inflated The First Story, making of it a pomp, an affair of gold-embroidered vestments and costly choirs, of marbles, of jeweled windows and of incense, unable to find the thrill as formerly in the plain and humble stable, and the brown-haired, grave-eyed peasant girl, with her little baby; unable to see the beauty in the crumbling mud walls, the low-ceiled interior, where the only incense was the sweet smell of the cow’s breath, the only vestments the swaddling clothes, rough, coarse-fibered, from the hand-looms of Nazareth, the only pomp the scanty gifts of three old men, and the only chanting the crooning of a young mother holding her firstborn babe upon her breast.
SALT AND SINCERITY
I
IF the signs of the times may be read aright, and the future forecasted, the volume of short stories is in a fair way of becoming a “rare book.” Fewer and fewer of this kind of literature are published every year, and only within the last week one of the foremost of the New York publishers has said that, so far as the material success was concerned, he would prefer to undertake a book of poems rather than a book of stories. Also he explains why. And this is the interesting thing. One has always been puzzled to account for this lapse from a former popularity of a style of fiction certainly legitimate and incontestably entertaining. The publisher in question cites the cheap magazines — the monthlies and weeklies — as the inimical factors. The people go to them for their short stories, not to the cloth-bound volumes for sale at a dollar or a dollar and a half. Why not, if the cheap magazines give “just as good”? Often, too, they give the very same stories which, later, are republished in book form. As the case stands now, any fairly diligent reader of two or three of the more important monthlies and weeklies may anticipate the contents of the entire volume, and very naturally he cannot be expected to pay a dollar for something he already has.
Or even suppose — as is now generally demanded by the publisher — the author adds to the forthcoming collection certain hitherto unpublished stories. Even this does not tempt the buyer. Turning over the leaves at the bookseller’s, he sees two, three, five, half a dozen familiar titles. “Come,” says he, “I have read three-fourths of this book already. I have no use for it.”
It is quite possible that this state of affairs will produce important results. It is yet, perhaps, too soon to say, but it is not outside the range of the probable that, in America at least, it will, in time to come, engender a decay in the quality of the short story. It may be urged that the high prices paid by periodicals to the important short-story writers — the best men — will still act as a stimulus to production. But this does not follow by any means. Authors are queer cattle. They do not always work for money, but sometimes for a permanent place in the eyes of the world. Books give them this — not fugitive short stories, published here and there, and at irregular intervals. Reputations that have been made by short stories published in periodicals may be counted upon the fingers of one hand. The “life of a novel” — to use a trade term — is to a certain extent indeterminable. The life of a short story, be it never
so excellent, is prolonged only till the next issue of the periodical in which it has appeared. If the periodical is a weekly it will last a week, if a monthly a month — and not a day more. If very good, it will create a demand for another short story by the same author, but that one particular contribution, the original one, is irretrievably and hopelessly dead.
If the author is in literature “for his own pocket every time,” he is generally willing to accept the place of a short-story writer. If he is one of the “best men,” working for a “permanent place,” he will turn his attention and time, his best efforts, to the writing of novels, reverting to the short story only when necessary for the sake of boiling the Pot and chasing the Wolf. He will abandon the field to the inferior men, or enter it only to dispose of “copy” which does not represent him at his best. And, as a result, the quality of the short story will decline more and more.
So, “taking one consideration with another,” it may be appropriate to inquire if it is not possible that the American short story is liable to decline in quality and standard of excellence.
And now comes again this question addressed to certain authors, “Which book do you consider your best?” and a very industrious and painstaking person is giving the answer to the world.
To what end it is difficult to see. Who cares which of the “Waverleys” Sir Walter thought his best? or which of the Rougon-Maquart M. Zola favours the most? The author’s point of view is very different from yours — the reader’s. Which one do you think the best? That’s the point. Do you not see that in the author’s opinion the novel he is working on at the moment, or which is in press and about to appear — in fine, the last one written — is for a very long time the best he has done? He would be a very poor kind of novelist if he did not think that.
And even in retrospect his opinion as to “his best book” is not necessarily final. For he will see good points in “unsuccessful” novels that the public and critics have never and will never discover; and also defects in what the world considers his masterpiece that for him spoil the entire story. His best novel is, as was said, the last he has written, or — and this more especially — the one he is going to write. For to a certain extent this is true of every author, whether fiction writer or not. Though he very often does better than he thinks he can, he never does so well as he knows he might.
His best book is the one that he never quite succeeds in getting hold of firmly enough to commit to paper. It is always just beyond him. Next year he is going to think it out, or the next after that, and instead he compromises on something else, and his chef d’œuvre is always a little ahead of him. If this, too, were not so, he would be a poor kind of writer. So that it seems to me the most truthful answer to the question, “What is your best book?’ would be, “The one I shall never write.”
Another ideal that such of the “people who imagine a vain thing” have long been pursuing is an English Academy of letters, and now that “the British Academy for the promotion of Historical, Philosophical and Philological studies” has been proposed, the old discussion is revived, and especially in England there is talk of a British Academy, something on the same lines as the Academie Française, which shall tend to promote and reward particularly the production of good fiction. In a word, it would be a distinction reserved only for the worthy, a charmed circle that would open only to the elite upon the vote of those already admitted. The proposition strikes one as preeminently ridiculous. Literature is of all arts the most democratic; it is of, by and for the people in a fuller measure than even government itself. And one makes the assertion without forgetting that fine mouth-filling phrase, the “aristocracy of letters.” The survival of the fittest is as good in the evolution of our literature as of our bodies, and the best “academy” for the writers of the United States is, after all, and in the last analysis, to be found in the judgment of the people, exercised throughout the lapse of a considerable time. For, give the people time enough, and they will always decide justly.
It was in connection with this talk about an “Academy” that Mr. Hall Caine has made the remark that “no academic study of a thing so variable, emotional and independent as the imaginative writer’s art could be anything but mischievous.” One is inclined to take exception to the statement. Why should the academic study of the principles of writing fiction be mischievous? Is it not possible to codify in some way the art of construction of novels so that they may be studied to advantage? This has, of course, never been done. But one believes that, if managed carefully and with a proper disregard of “set forms” and hampering conventions, it would be possible to start and maintain a school of fiction-writing in the most liberal sense of the word “school.” Why should it be any more absurd than the painting schools and music schools? Is the art of music, say, any less variable, less emotional, less independent, less imaginative than the fiction-writer’s. Heretical as the assertion may appear, one is thoroughly convinced that the art of novel writing (up to a certain point, bien entendu) can be acquired by instruction just as readily and with results just as satisfactory and practical as the arts of painting, sculpture, music, and the like. The art of fiction is, in general, based upon four qualities of mind: observation, imagination, invention and sympathy. Certainly the first two are “acquired characters.” Kindergarten children the world over are acquiring them every day. Invention is immensely stimulated by observation and imagination, while sympathy is so universally a fundamental quality with all sorts and conditions of men and women — especially the latter — that it needs but little cultivation. Why, then, would it be impossible for a few of our older, more seriously minded novelists to launch a School of Instruction in the Art of Composition — just as Bougereau, Lefevre, Boulanger and Tony Robert Fleury founded Julien’s in Paris?
At present the stimulus to, and even the manner of, production of very much of American fiction is in the hands of the publishers. No one not intimately associated with any one of the larger, more important “houses” can have any idea of the influence of the publisher upon latter-day fiction. More novels are written — practically — to order than the public has any notion of. The publisher again and again picks out the man (one speaks, of course, of the younger generation), suggests the theme, and exercises, in a sense, all the functions of instructor during the period of composition. In the matter of this “picking out of the man” it is rather curious to note a very radical change that has come about in the last five years. Time was when the publisher waited for the unknown writer to come to him with his manuscript. But of late the Unknown has so frequently developed, under exploitation and by direct solicitation of the publisher, into a “money-making proposition” of such formidable proportions that there is hardly a publishing house that does not now hunt him out with all the resources at its command. Certain fields are worked with the thoroughness, almost, of a political canvass, and if a given State — as, for instance, Indiana — has suddenly evolved into a region of great literary activity, it is open to suspicion that it is not because there is any inherent literary quality in the people of the place greater than in other States, but that certain firms of publishers are “working the ground.”
It might not have been altogether out of place if upon the Victor Hugo monument which has just been unveiled in Paris there had been inscribed this, one of the most important of the great Frenchman’s maxims:
“Les livres n’ont jamais faites du mal”; and I think that in the last analysis, this is the most fitting answer to Mr. Carnegie, who, in his address before the Author’s Club, put himself on record as willing to exclude from the libraries he is founding all books not three years old. No doubt bad books have a bad influence, but bad books are certainly better than no books at all. For one must remember that the worst books are not printed — the really tawdry, really pernicious, really evil books. These are throttled in manuscript by the publishers, who must be in a sense public censors. No book, be assured, goes to press but that there is — oh, hidden away like a grain o
f mustard — some bit, some modicum, some tiny kernel of good in it. Perhaps it is not that seed of goodness that the cultured, the fastidious care much about. Perhaps the discriminating would call it a platitude. But one is willing to believe that somewhere, somehow, this atom of real worth makes itself felt — and that’s a beginning. It will create after awhile a taste for reading. And a taste for reading is a more important factor in a nation’s literary life than the birth of a second Shakespeare.
It is the people, after all, who “make a literature.” If they read, the few, the “illuminati,” will write. But first must come the demand — come from the people, the Plain People, the condemned bourgeoisie. The select circles of the élite, the “studio” hangers-on, the refined, will never, never, clamour they never so loudly, toil they never so painfully, produce the Great Writer. The demand which he is to supply comes from the Plain People — from the masses, and not from the classes. There is more significance as to the ultimate excellence of American letters in the sight of the messenger boy devouring his “Old Sleuths” and “Deadwood Dicks” and “Boy Detectives,” with an earnest, serious absorption, than in the spectacle of a “reading circle” of dilletanti coquetting with Verlaine and pretending that they understand.